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at Delmonico's, and he made me the following very singular relation: 'I had returned from a somewhat prolonged stay at Vienna,' he said, 'to Paris, late in 1860. During the fall and winter of that year I spent a good deal of time at the Louvre, making a few studies, and satisfying myself as to some identities that had been called in question during my rambles through the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, having a baker with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed. 'I do not know that I can have any objection to your knowing, before I go any further, that I am and have been for some years a believer in that of which Hamlet speaks when he says: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.' You may call me a _Spiritualist_, if you like, for I have no reverence for or aversion to names. I do not call _myself_ so; I only say that I believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity--that 'tongs with which God holds the world'--as a strong but odd thinker once said in my presence, may be the medium of communication; but even this must be informed by a living and sentient spirit, or it can convey nothing. People learn what they would not otherwise know, through mediums which they do not recognize and by processes which they can not explain; and to know this is to have left the beaten track of old beliefs, and plunged into a maze of speculation, which probably makes madmen of a hundred while it is making a wise man of _one_. But I am wandering too far and telling you nothing. 'One of my few intimates in Paris, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, n
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